


Crying Blood for Vengeance

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Iliad - Homer
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 03:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Achilles mourns, told of Patroclus' end." Chapman's Iliad, Book Eighteen, The Argument.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crying Blood for Vengeance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



You lie by the wine-dark sea and let the waves lull you in your mother’s voice, honey-sweet and blood-deep, the wash of it against the sand the wash of blood in you. You will not sleep, you will not eat—it shames you, to hunger and tire. It is as to surrender grief, to admit that yet your body strives to live. Yet Zeus has given you all you wanted—the Greeks are in rout, and only you can snatch victory from man-slaying Hektor.

 

You will die here. It worries you that you might die like this, waste in grief till your bones are picked clean by the birds you have fed flesh—them, and their fathers and theirs, too—ten years you have given carrion to birds and dogs. Ten years you have been here, fighting for some man’s flighty wife. Ten years, and the end of it might be here, by the sea and your ships, and not in battle.

 

It worries you, in what respite you snatch from grief. You cannot bear to look upon the body of your friend, cousin, brother, lover. Sweet fool, brave fool, what god had guided him to death-dealing Hektor, sure in his pride of strength, as a yearling lion, bare grown to the hunt, that challenges the black-bearded lion, milk-fangs bared in defiance he had gone to Hektor.

 

Yet that, too, is a lie you concoct to blame the dead—you have never been good at lying, it shames you to need subterfuge. Patroklos had been no beardling, blood-drenched before the first down graced his mouth. Blood had brought him, fleeing to Pthia, to Peleus, to you still a child yearning for his goddess mother. And the man-slaying hands had gentled you in your childish fits. He had been a warrior then, the spear weighing his hands down, when Hektor had been scarcely a man. Apollo struck him down, in his pride of strength, in the gentleness of his heart that would not let him hear his friends cut down in war.

 

When Antilochus spoke of it to you, trembling in his limbs like a horse having won the chariot-race, you could see only his face gleaming with joy as the burnished helmet you put on him. Your father’s armour, gifted by the gods. And then wave upon wave, relentless as your mother’s kindness came all his faces, all the ways he has looked upon you in love and laughter and slow-creeping misery, and you fell shuddering to your knees felled by horror. The earth you poured upon your bright head was the dirt rubbed into Patroklos’ hair—sweet fool, why would you go to war against man-slaying Hektor and not return to the ships and safety?—as they fought over his naked corpse on the field, Hektor and the Ajaxes, and the son of Anchises.

 

She has gone, again, your goddess mother your cries brought to your side—Patroklos had taken you from her, and held you with gentler hands—to Olympus to beg you armour from the god’s own forge. And yet you worry that you shall die here, scant distance from the son of Menoitios, that you will clasp his cold hand in yours and let your body go cold, ere she returns. It will be a death at Troy, and one remembered. The gods have given you always all you wanted, and never what you desired to have.


End file.
